I recently read “What Went Wrong: The Collapse of the Israeli Palestinian Peace Process,” which appeared (behind a firewall) in Political Science Quarterly in the summer of 2001. (The essay is available online to subscribers and those with access to various academic data bases). I’ve not seen anywhere a more careful and substantial debunking of the main talking points of Israeli hasbara, from the notion that the war was forced upon Israelis who in 1948 were otherwise all too happy to accept the UN’s partition resolution, to the idea that Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians everything they could conceivably have wanted for an independent state at Camp David in 2000, only to have Yasser Arafat walk away. Both propositions are simply false, though they have become–through constant media repetition—very nearly the American received wisdom. Since there is no reason to think that Bibi Netanyahu is more inclined to allow the Palestinians a viable state than Barak was, there really is little chance that Kerry’s mission will succeed—unless of course the Palestinian leadership has been sufficiently corrupted and bribed to sell out legitimate Palestinian aspirations.

Since Slater’s exemplary scholarship is not easily available on the internet, I will quote at length several of his paragraphs, which challenge the conventional wisdom but should be part of it.

The evidence is now irrefutable that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, and the other leading Zionists “accepted” the UN compromise only as a necessary tactical step that would later be reversed, a base from which Israel would later expand to include all of biblical Palestine. In many private statements, Ben-Gurion was quite explicit, as in a 1937 letter to his son: “A partial Jewish state is not the end, but only the beginning. The establishment of such a Jewish state will serve as a means in our historical efforts to redeem the country in its entirety. . . . We shall organize a modern defense force . . .and then I am certain that we will not be prevented from settling in other parts of the country, either by mutual agreement with our Arab neighbors or by some other means. . . . We will expel the Arabs and take their places . . . with the force at our disposal.” A year later, Ben-Gurion told a Zionist meeting: “I favor partition of the country because when we become a strong power after the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and spread throughout all of Palestine.” And “Palestine,” as understood by the Zionists, included the West Bank, Jerusalem, the Syrian Golan Heights, southern Lebanon, and much of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: At each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.

Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: ‘if only’, they love to think, ‘if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen’. Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical. At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.

A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalized industries. After a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: ‘If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country.’ I made some deprecatory reply, to the effect that even this Government wouldn’t last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: ‘I have three children, all of them have been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan’t be satisfied till I have seen them settled overseas. In this country in fifteen or twenty years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.’

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that this country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.

In fifteen or twenty years, on present trends, there will be in this country 3 1/2 million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to Parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General’s office. There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of 5-7 million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by different sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.

[…]

Nothing is more misleading than comparison between the Commonwealth immigrant in Britain and the American Negro. The Negro population of the United states, which was already in existence before the United States became a nation, started literally as slaves and were later given the franchise and other rights of citizenship, to the exercise of which they have only gradually and still incompletely come. The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knows no discrimination between one citizen and another, and he entered instantly into the possession of the rights of every citizen, from the vote to free treatment under the National Health Service. Whatever drawbacks attended the immigrants – and they were drawbacks which did not, and do not, make admission into Britain by hook or by crook appear less than desirable – arose not from the law or from public policy or from administration but from those personal circumstances and accidents which cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be different for another’s.

But while to the immigrant entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country. They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. On top of this, they now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by Act of Parliament: a law, which cannot, and is not intended, to operate to protect them or redress their grievances, is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.

In the hundreds upon hundreds of letters I received when I last spoke on this subject two or three months ago, there was one striking feature which was largely new and which I find ominous. All Members of Parliament are used to the typical anonymous correspondent; but what surprised and alarmed me was the high proportion of ordinary, decent, sensible people, writing a rational and often well-educated letter, who believed that they had to omit their address because it was dangerous to have committed themselves to paper to a Member of Parliament agreeing with the views I had expressed, and that they would risk either penalties or reprisals if they were known to have done so. The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine. I am going to allow just one of those hundreds of people to speak for me. She did give her name and address, which I have detached from the letter which I am about to read. She was writing from Northumberland about something which is happening at this moment in my own constituency:

Eight years ago in a respectable street in Wolverhampton a house was sold to a Negro. Now only one white (a woman old-age pensioner) lives there. This is her story. She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet streets became a place of noise and confusion.

Regretfully, her white tenants moved out.

The day after the last one left, she was awakened at 7 a.m. by two Negroes who wanted to use her phone to contact their employer. When she refused, as she would have refused any stranger at such an hour, she was abused and feared she would have been attacked but for the chain on her door. Immigrant families have tried to rent rooms in her house, but she always refused. Her little store of money went, and after paying her rates, she had less than £2 per week. She went to apply for a rate reduction and was seen by a young girl, who on hearing she had a seven-roomed house, suggested she should let part of it. When she said the only people she could get were Negroes, the girl said ‘racial prejudice won’t get you anywhere in this country’. So she went home.

The telephone is her lifeline. Her family pay the bill, and help her out as best they can. Immigrants have offered to buy her house – at a price which the prospective landlord would be able to recover from his tenants in weeks, or at most in a few months. She is becoming afraid to go out.

Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. ‘Racialist’, they chant. When the new Race Relations Bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder.

The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word ‘integration’. To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members. Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction. But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one to boot.

We are on the verge of here of a change. Hitherto it has been force of circumstance and of background which has rendered the very idea of integration inaccessible to the greater part of the immigrant population – that they never conceived or intended such a thing, and that their numbers and physical concentration meant the pressures towards integration which normally bear upon any small minority did not operate. Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of action domination, first over fellow immigrants and then over the rest of the population. The cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, that can so rapidly overcast the sky, has been visible recently in Wolverhampton and has shown signs of spreading quickly. The words I am about to use, verbatim as they appeared in the local press on 17 February, are not mine, but those of a Labour Member of Parliament who is a Minister in the present Government.

The Sikh communities’ campaign to maintain customs inappropriate in Britain is much to be regretted. Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker: whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.

All credit to John Stonehouse for having had the insight to perceive that, and the courage to say it.

For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organize to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding.

Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century.

Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.
entical. At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it, deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.

Dear Mr. Powell,

I hope you are looking down upon your people in heaven, regretfully aware that your prophetic vision has come to pass (and then some!) Soon after this speech, you later projected that Britain’s non-white population would grow from 1.2 million, in 1968 to 4.5 million in 2002 (in 2001 it was 4,635,296). You were also right about “whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.” Quoting Virgil didn’t do any good — the so-called intelligensia of your noble country didn’t want to listen to your message, just like the intelligensia ignore the warnings smart folks try to make about immigrants in this country. But you were a class act who tried your best to do what was right — I can only hope we who follow in your footsteps here in America do the same.

I ask the Serras if there’s anything CPS could do to keep middle-class families. Sue says it should add more high schools with special programs for kids “who aren’t in the top 1 percent, but maybe they’re in the top 10 percent.”

She also thinks CPS needs to make its neighborhood high schools more attractive. “Let’s say there was a big plan to completely rehab Mather—to put an addition on it, and bring in new staff and a new principal, and introduce some kind of cool curriculum, some new style of learning. It would have made us think a lot harder about staying.”

Sandro’s not so sure. “In my mind, it always comes back to the home.” He says he means the home of the children who’d be his daughters’ classmates. “Do they have a good home environment?”

Sandro says he realizes that many parents on the south and west sides have children in schools far worse than Mather. “I’m so empathetic for those folks because they don’t deserve that,” he says. “Crime and poverty is higher in those areas. It’s a formula for disaster. I don’t see how you can function on the level of funding we have now.”

– from the Chicago Reader’s September 24, 2013 cover story “Three families tell us why they ditched CPS”

Dear Sandro (and Steve Bogira, who should know better),

I thought the portrait of you and your family sketched out by the writer Steve Borgia in the above referenced article was absolutely delightful. You, your wife and your daughters would make great neighbors up here on the northwest side (where you should have moved in the first place so you had a good local elementary school and high school — but you would have missed out on some city amenities, so I guess it might not have been worth it for you and your wife and at the time). Anyway, I think you make an excellent point about the home environment of our State’s children, even better than you realize. Because quite frankly, there is not much that even the best school can do for kids who don’t have the smarts or come from screwed up homes. And even more quite frankly, you are going to find a lot of those kids on the south and west sides of Chicago — and spending more money on those kids isn’t going to help one bit.

In addition, it is very misleading for you say “the state should also spend far more on education…Illinois ranks last nationally in school funding”. Most common-sense, fair readings of those statements would suggest that on a per-pupil basis, Illinois spends less than other states on education — which is not true. Steve Bogira’s sneaky link tells the real story — Illinois happens to fund schools mostly through property taxes rather than some sort of state sales tax or the lottery (although we use those methods as well). But if you check out this link you find that Illinois is actually ranked number 22 out of 50 states with respect to per-pupil spending — and it is worth pointing out that number 2 is the well-functioning, high-achieving schools of Washington DC and number 50 is the cesspit of crumbling schools and burnouts living in the state of Utah (can you detect a hint of sarcasm — if not, you should). Can you tell me anything different about the schools in Utah and DC besides the fact that Utah spends only $6,212 per student and DC spends almost three times as much at $18,475? And what’s funny about both Utah and DC is that neither system is particularly diverse — but one gets good outcomes and one doesn’t. I wonder why…

1.People want to employ each other across borders, but laws prevent them from doing so.
2.I say, employment is a good thing, so let’s change the law accordingly.
3.The Anonymous Reach counters that this argument is “fallacious” because of point #1.

It’s hard to take that kind of argument seriously, even despite the Friends-esque condescending writing tone employed to clearly convey to me that 1 implies 3. This is an utter failure of coherent logic.

But, I said at the outset of this post that The Anonymous Reach’s post was revealing, and poor reasoning and failures of logic aren’t particularly “revealing.” What’s revealing is what happens next:

CHANDLER: Okay so if I want to hire a guy without a driver’s license to be my pizza delivery driver, the driver’s licensing laws should be bent/changed.
JOEY: Um…
CHANDLER: If I want to hire a registered sex-offender to be my daycare worker.
JOEY: Uh…
CHANDLER: If I want to hire a convicted murderer serving a life sentence in jail to be my travelling salesman.
JOEY: !
CHANDLER: All of those legal statuses should automatically just be bent/altered so that the person I Want To Hire and Gave A Job Offer To can perform the job task in question? My desire to hire the person and the mere existence of my job offer trumps all other considerations?
JOEY: I mean, yeah. That is fundamentally what I’m saying, I guess.

So The Anonymous Reach has decided to compare would-be immigrants with job offers to… sex-offenders and convicted murderers. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Anti-immigration sentiment amounts to nothing more than a hateful ideology steeped in xenophobia and ethnocentrism. Those who feel otherwise should at least stop comparing immigration to murder and sexual abuse. Right?

As a blogger who loves both the Crimson Reach (who blogs at Rhymes With Cars & Girls) and Ryan Long (who blogs at Stationary Waves), I’m going to try and play peacemeaker and attempt to bridge the rhetorical divide between the two that has opened up into quite a chasm lately. I think there are two basic problems:

1) The first is that Mr. Long objects to The Crimson Reach’s rhetorical style, which I admit can be properly characterized as “snarky” or maybe more charitably as “bitting satire”. Satire is not everyone’s cup of tea, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t being used to make a serious point. Take the dialogue quoted above — obviously The Reach is using a reductio ad absurdum style argument when he mentions the possible extreme situations of various undesirable workers to demonstrate the idea that just because a worker has a job (or an employer wants to hire a worker, or a worker is looking for a job) it doesn’t mean that other considerations shouldn’t come into play when considering whether or not a country might want to consider letting that worker into the country if he is an immigrant. What frustrates The Reach, I think, and makes him turn to satire (although he tends toward satire in general) is that many open border folks like to argue in moral terms for their position without acknowledging that there are moral trade-offs involved when we let large numbers of immigrants from foreign cultures into this country, even if the immigrants will boost the economy. In other words, not everything is about economics (and even when it is about economics, there are winners and losers involved so we might need to think through the policy implications beyond ‘this will boost GDP’).

2) The second problem is that Mr. Long likes to throw around words like “xenophobia” and “ethnocentrism” and in a later post he even suggests that those of us who admire Steve Sailer are “fanning the flames of genocide”. Click on that link and check out the post he suggests is “scary stuff”. The post that “promotes the formation of a Kurd state by rekindling the German motherland idea as written about in Omnipotent Government, while sounding the alarm about immigration into France and the UK.” Now I admit I’ve never read Mises Omnipotent Government, but to me, the suggestion that the Kurdish people deserve a national homeland (which has been denied them for no particularly good reason since the end of WWI) is just not that scary. Especially since the Kurds have been content to work more or less peacefully for their state now that they have autonomy within Iraq. More generally, the idea that individual ethnic groups via their respective nation-states should want to defend their culture and heritage is likewise an idea that holds no terror for me — I agree it can be used to oppress and destroy ethnic or religious minorities but so can class differences or disputes over resources or concerns about not being able to live out a culture, etc. In other words, the question of how mankind decides to use its sinful nature to hurt other men is always going to be something we need to guard against and think about, but ignoring mankind’s desire to speak their own language, practice their own religion, govern themselves as they see fit, etc. is probably a receipe for disaster. I suppose this makes me an ethnocentrist, but I’m not sure this needs to be a “bad” idea or one that necessarily correlates perfectly with “xenophobia” or genocide or any sort of hatred at all. I think my Christian faith makes me particularly concerned for the immortal souls of everyone on Earth and I’m called to love all of mankind. I also wouldn’t be reading Steve Sailer on a regular basis if I thought he was full of hate or had a particular animosity for his fellow man.

…because everyone knows that truck drivers love the Jewish State and assassinated Israeli Prime Ministers get special love!

And Local 700 gave $25,000 to the New York-based American Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center in 2011, Labor Department records show. That group honored Coli and Emanuel in June 2012 at a Chicago Hilton and Towers gala that collected more than $650,000 for the Rabin Center, a library and research center in Israel.

More sleaze here. What’s amazing is that the rank and file don’t freak out and rebel — I guess they feel like they are getting good results from Coli? Any Teamsters who read this blog want to weigh in?

Opponents of immigration often compare nations to households. Under this analogy, citizens are members of the household, while an illegal immigrant is “like a roommate who doesn’t pay the rent.” We wouldn’t allow someone to barge into our household and use all of our private property, so why would anyone allow an immigrant to barge into a country and attempt to find a job?

Weaknesses of this analogy aside, it rests on a view of property rights that is perhaps best outlined here by blogger Simon Grey. In summary, the argument goes:

1. Under most reasonable people’s understanding of property rights, a single owner of private property is entitled to keep anyone of his or her property for any reason whatsoever.

2. A group of private property owners on adjacent properties may fence their properties together and do likewise.

3. Such a group of property owners can further outsource the management of property linkages, such as common roads, sidewalks, etc. to a third-party (e.g. a homeowners’ association) if they so choose.

4. The above is similar enough to a state that appeals to property rights are consistent with this analogy.

I find this argument unpersuasive, for following reasons: First, under this argument, natives also have a right to transact with immigrants, thus the concept provides no special reason to oppose immigration. Second, because this argument makes certain assumptions about governance of the commons, it ceases to be an argument about property rights and reduces to a declaration about moral governance (an argument which can be disputed on a purely moral basis independent of property rights). Finally, advocating for open borders is in no shape or form a violation of anyone’s property rights.

An excellent post — I’m pleased to see you tackle the best arguments of your opponents rather than the typical straw-men and silliness I often read from immigration “reform” advocates. That said, I don’t think you are effective for a couple of reasons:

1) I think the property rights ‘analogy’, used by Simon Grey and others is really more of an argument about what to do with the commons — I think it can simply be useful to think about the nation-state as a large family or household whose family members are looking out for one another but don’t always have the same interests or goals. That’s why it can be helpful, at times, to talk to hard-core libertarians about the property rights of groups (i.e. groups of families that band together for the common good — a nation-state!)

2) So we are really arguing about the “governance of the commons” or as you put it later in your piece:

In truth, public land, public offices, and public resources are merely stewarded by the state. We call it “public property” only because it is not owned by private individuals. It is tempting for libertarian minds to reason that this is unfair or inappropriate – perhaps such reasoning even has a sound basis – but so long as property is owned and operated by the state, it is subject only to the will of the state.

Therefore, if the state decides to take an anti-immigration policy stance, the borders will be closed. If the state chooses to open the borders to the many benefits of free human migration, the borders will be open.

This gets us down to brass tacks and I think, if I read you correctly, suggests that what we are really arguing over is not the moral right of the state to close the borders (I guess it depends on how serious you are about defending the part about “such reasoning even has a sound basis”), which you agree it does, but whether or not it serves the public good for the state to restrict immigration in the way folks like me, Steve Sailer, Joe Arpaio, etc. would prefer.

3) The only issue I have remaining with your post is the idea that “Even if immigration restrictionists are within their rights to close the borders, that still does not address the fact that the arguments for opening the borders are an appeal to change minds, and are therefore no threat to anyone’s property rights whatsoever.” The problem, of course, is that restrictionists can and do argue that certain kinds of large-scale immigration will indeed threaten certain individuals property rights (including their right to life via increased risk of crime — Ron Unz’s convoluted arguments to the contrary!) This idea is obviously debatable, but you seem to acknowledge the potential for conflict exists when you say earlier that “Of course, opponents of immigration can always invoke the principle of collective property rights to argue against open borders, but such claims run contrary to the spirit in which property rights were invoked in the first place.” But if I believe that the commons will be harmed and/or even individuals will be harmed via large-scale immigration (i.e. there may be short-term economic benefits to immigration but there will be long-term harms to the public fisc, to community cohesiveness, to crime, etc.) then one could argue eventually individual property rights will be harmed. These harms will even eventually impact GDP — as one of my friends and co-bloggers puts it:

Crime, for example, is pretty inefficient for a community. The community has to expend resources to hunt down the criminals. Property and persons are damaged. Nobody who wants a healthy economy wants more crime.

The same is true of corruption and the absence of security of contract. If we import Mexican-style corruption and insecurity to the United States, we degrade the economy of the United States.

We can put the matter starkly if a tad over-simplistically if we tell the libertarians that there is a reason why Mexico is Mexico and the U.S. is the U.S., and that there is a reason why people prefer to be here rather than there. In the long run (and maybe in the not-so-long run as well) the more we make the U.S. or regions of the U.S. more like Mexico, the less economic efficiency and health we will have in the U.S. That predicted increase in GDP itself can’t go on forever in states that descend further into anarchy, crime, and corruption.

It isn’t only public finances that will suffer in such a scenario but, of course, private finances as well.

So while I don’t think this is actually a good answer to immigration restrictionists; I do think you helped clarify some of the issues involved, helped us reach some common ground and I give you credit for arguing in good faith. Keep up the good work.

Just a quick note to my thousands three readers — I decided to updates my links to remove “Aretae” and “OneSTDV” who were both good bloggers but decided to take down their public blogs.

In their place, for now, all I added was the blog “Stationary Waves” — I figure if I can make fun of Mr. Long and he has the guts to come over here and read my criticism, the least I can do is start reading him more regularly. I have to admit that so far, I like his fitness advice, find that he links to other good libertarian bloggers on economic issues, but remains annoying when it comes to immigration and race. So YMMV.

One question for him, in case he pops over here again — since you seem to be a fan of Bollywood I wonder if you’ve seen the film Three Idiots? It was recommended to me and then the (Indian) guy who made the recommendation gave me a bootleg copy to watch on DVD. The problem with this (besides the fact that I was breaking the law) was that the copy I watched had really bad subtitles — it was as if whoever made the subtitles decided to only translate about a third of the film. Despite this handicap, I still loved the film! It was surprisingly emotional, clever, funny and the songs were integrated into the plot very well — they felt organic and a part of that world — all the best musicals seem to achieve this quality. Anyway, it would be interesting to get your take and read any other recommendations you might have regarding Bollywood.